the world as the declared enemy of the Church and the Pope, the
champion of the Bible as the sole rule of faith, and the defender of
individual judgment as its only interpreter. In these works he
rejected the Mass, Transubstantiation, vows of chastity, pilgrimages,
fasts, the Sacraments, the powers of the priesthood, and the
jurisdiction and supremacy of the Pope. With such a man there could be
no longer any question of leniency or of compromise. The issues at
stake, namely, whether the wild and impassioned assertions of a rebel
monk should be accepted in preference to the teaching of Christ's
Church, ought to have been apparent to every thinking man; and yet so
blinded were some of his contemporaries by their sympathy with the
Humanists as against the Theologians, that even still they forced
themselves to believe Luther sought only for reform.

At Rome the trouble in Germany was one of the main subjects that
engaged the attention of the Curia. It was felt that the time had come
when decisive measures must be taken. After long and anxious
deliberations Leo X. published the Bull, /Exsurge Domine/ (June 1520),
in which forty propositions taken from Luther's writings were
condemned, his works were ordered to be burned, the full penalties of
excommunication were proclaimed against him unless he withdrew his
errors and made his submission within sixty days, while his aiders and
abettors were besought in the most touching terms to abandon the
dangerous path into which they had been betrayed. Had such a
pronouncement been issued at the beginning of the movement it might
have done much to restore peace to the Church, but, coming as it did
at a time when Luther's movement, backed by all the revolutionary
forces of Germany, had already acquired considerable dimensions, it
failed to put an end to the tumult. Besides, the papal decision was
deprived of much of its force by the fact that Eck, Caraccioli, and